Dark Specter by Michael Dibdin Read Free Book Online Page B

knew it wasn’t true for him any more than for the goddamn car. Fact was, their cores were both fucked.
    We should never have moved here, he thought for the thousandth time. It had seemed like a great idea at the time. For the price of a studio apartment in Honolulu, they could get a family home with a yard and a garage in Seattle. True, he’d had to start at the bottom of the ladder again, going from sergeant in Hawaii back to plain officer with the King County Police, but that had seemed a price worth paying. Marti was delighted with her new home, the kids were happy at school, he had his RV to go hunting and fishing. Everything was just great, except that his core was fucked. I wasn’t meant to live in this cold, wet, timber-haunted landscape, he thought. I was meant to live and die on the islands, and my gods are punishing me for my desertion.
    The call was the one cops dreaded most: domestic disturbance. Then Robinson heard the address, and eased up a little. Pearce rolled up the remains of his tostada in the 100 percent recycled paper bag and tossed it in back.
    “Don’t break the limit getting over there,” Robinson told him. “We let him work on her a little, maybe this time she’ll press charges.”
    “These guys regulars?” asked Pearce, putting the Chevy in drive and hanging a U across the oncoming traffic. “Kinda strange timing.”
    Robinson grunted. Pearce still wasn’t up to speed on the precinct. In town, most domestic violence occurred in the evening, when folks were tense from a day’s work and a long commute and had had a couple of belts to unwind. But Renfrew Avenue South East was in the slurbs, the swathe of suburban slums in the unincorporated areas of the county stretching inland from the southern tip of Lake Washington. You were talking high unemployment, mothers on shift work, the kids at the childcare center, the men spending all day down at the stuccoed, mirror-windowed licensed restaurant where no one had ordered a meal in twenty years. Domestic tensions could flare up any time of the day or night, particularly at 14218 Renfrew Avenue.
    Robinson had lost count of the times he’d been called to the Sullivan house, maybe because it always seemed like the same call. Guy beats up on his wife, someone calls 911, soon as you show up they both turn on you and tell you it’s none of your fucking business, wife denies he ever laid a hand on her, guy says she hurt herself falling, not a goddamn thing you can do. Robinson had hoped things might improve when they finally split up. Some chance. Wayne still hung around there half the time, the only difference was he had another woman down in Renton he was beating up too.
    They drove up a hill dominated by a huge water tower and a sprinkling of conifers, degenerate offspring of the giants which had preceded them, past a bowling alley and a bingo hall, the Thrift Store and the Splash ‘n’ Dash car wash, the Silk Plant Center and the Hallmark outlet, by signs reading RENT-2-OWN AND NO HASSLE LOANS . It had started to rain again. Overhead, a suffocating mass of clouds miles high pressed down on the landscape. Robinson thought of the candid azure skies of his home state, and shivered.
    Pearce took a left at the lights, passing a strip mall and the Faith in Focus Worship Center, whose reader board said “If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” Then they were into the grid of residential streets, GI starter homes originally, small squat boxes with gravel lots surrounded by chain-link fencing, 25 mph limits, lots of all-way stops, no sidewalks. You had to be rich to walk these days, like the yuppies down by the lake. These people were too poor.
    Except for a few decorative details, the house was identical to its neighbors. Woodgrain-effect vinyl siding, skimpy windows, a worn afghan draped over the sofa on the front porch, three pick-ups in various stages of cannibalization in the yard. There was no one around. Pearce parked by a telephone pole,